You use the ‘touch’ command to create two blank files, with a last modified date that you specify – one with a date of the start of the range you want to specify, and the second with a date at the end of the range you want to specify. Then you reference to those two files in your find command:

touch /tmp/temp -t 200604141130
touch /tmp/ntemp -t 200604261630
find /data/ -cnewer /tmp/temp -and ! -cnewer /tmp/ntemp

I wrote an email alerter that sends me an email whenever the upcoming temperature may dip below freezing. It uses the Magpie RSS reader to pull down a 3 day weather forecast that is provided for my area in RSS form by the BBC weather site. It then parses this forecast and determines if either today’s or tomorrow’s weather may dip below freezing. If it might, it sends an email to my email address to warn me.

I scheduled this script to run every day by adding it as a daily cron job on my web host. You can set this up for any web hosts that support cron jobs.

items) != 3){
                $message .= 'Error: problem parsing BBC weather feed';
        }
        $i=0;
        foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
                $href = $item['link'];
                $title = $item['title'];
                preg_match('/Min Temp:.+?-*\d*/',$title,$mintemp);
                preg_match('/Max Temp:.+?-*\d*/',$title,$maxtemp);
                $mintemp[0] = str_replace('Min Temp: ','',$mintemp[0]);
                $maxtemp[0] = str_replace('Max Temp: ','',$maxtemp[0]);
                $mins[$i] = (int)$mintemp[0];
                $maxs[$i] = (int)$maxtemp[0];
                $i++;
        }

        // freezing warnings

        if($mins[0] < 0){
                $message .= "Today's temperature in W3 may go below freezing, anything down to ".$mins[0];
        }
        if($mins[1] < 0){
                $message .= "Tommorow's temperature in W3 may go below freezing, anything down to ".$mins[1];
        }

        if($message){
                $to = "contact@davidcraddock.net";
                $subject = "Freezing weather alert for " . date('l jS \of F');
                mail($to,$subject,$message);
        }

?>

You can right click on this link and ‘save as’ to download the script.

Here is some python code I adapted from this stackoverflow post to get the first day of a week specificed by a week number. This method includes leap year and summer time differences.

import time
def weeknum(num,year):
	instr = str(year)+" "+str(num-1)+" 1"
	print time.asctime(time.strptime(instr,'%Y %W %w'))

Here is me exectuting the code in Python’s IDLE shell:

See that the first week of 2009 actually started in 2008, but by the end of that week we are in 2009.

Quite cool little app that allows you to listen to different BBC Radio programmes from within a standalone application, instead of iPlayer:

http://whomwah.github.com/radioaunty/

MediaMonkey is a popular free media player for Windows. It has a great feature that allows you to transfer to and from an iPhone that is not registered with your computer. Normally only one iTunes install can be associated with your iPhone, but MediaMonkey allows you another way to transfer music and audio files with a ‘guest’ iPhone. Check it out, it works:

MediaMonkey